The Folk Way of Life: Embodying the spirit of tradition, John C. Campbell Folk School invites students to engage their hands in craft, voices and instruments in song, and hearts in community

Metalwork across campus, such as a weather vane atop the Blacksmith Shop, highlights the traditional skills in practice

Doll-making instructor Lillian Alberti demonstrates her method of working with paper clay to create armature. The dolls are completed with painted features and handmade clothes.

Music and dance are central to the experience, from the Morningsong gathering that begins each day to the spirited evenings of contra and square dancing in the Keith House Community Room.

The Festival Barn is the site of many concerts, dances, and celebrations.

In the woodworking studio, a half-complete dulcimer sits on a workbench. The instrument will be finished by the end of the week.

During the summer, each week is dedicated to a theme. Ralph Lee Smith gives an evening talk as part of Dulcimer Week.

In the weaving studio, advanced students practice twill patterns on the looms.

Like her mother, wood-carving teacher Helen Gibson is a member of the Brasstown Carvers, a collective formed in the early decades of the school. A number of carvers still sell their creations at the school’s gallery. Here, Gibson works on her specialty: Moses.

Instructor Ralph Lee Smith, an expert in the history of the mountain dulcimer, holds a circa-1890s instrument from the school's collection.

Instructor Jeff Mohr (center) got his start in blacksmithing as a student at the school 30 years ago. In his Home and Hearth course, he shares forging techniques for making fireplace accessories, gates, furniture, and more.

Students bunk in cabins, dorms, and cottages, including the Farm House. They can also camp on the grounds.

Working the wheel in the pottery studio

Meals are served family-style, and switching tables is encouraged; you might sit with blacksmiths at breakfast, dulcimer makers at dinner.

Harvests from the vegetable gardens, tended by work-study students, contribute to the meals.

The campus is spread across 300 acres of fields and woods. A country road leads to the Blacksmith Shop and Orchard House.

Of the hundreds of weekend and weeklong classes offered, broom making is a perennial favorite.

A textile piece housed in the History Center captures the spirit the school was founded on nearly 90 years ago: joyful communal labor and the dignity of working with your hands.

Deep in the rolling hills just past the crossroads at Brasstown, people from all over the country converge to set their hands and hearts to practicing traditional forms of craft. They learn to take the most basic of materials—planks of wood, clay, thread, straw, and steel—and transform them into objects both useful and beautiful: handwoven cloth and pottery, baskets and brooms, forged tools, even musical instruments. This is magic as it’s practiced at John C. Campbell Folk School.

In the early decades, the students were people of the hills, coming to intertwine their livelihoods with the skills emblematic of simple mountain life, as envisioned by founder Olive Dame Campbell, who named the school for her husband.

Nearly 90 years later, a wider audience comes to connect with the old ways. They teach wood and wire to sing in the plaintive voice of the mountain dulcimer. They make steel soft as putty in the blacksmith shop, and with a hammer’s blow, shape it into a delicate leaf or flower. They coax base dirt to rise up and serve our need for a hand-thrown cup or bowl.

At night, fireflies flicker over mowed pastures and vegetable gardens. The hoots of owls from the woods overlap with the distant lowing of cows. And the students sleep the sleep of the innocent, hands tired from practicing magic all day.